According to law US enforcement officers who were undercover in the mafia in the 50s -80s the so called Mafia code of honor is a complete hollywood fabrication, and the mafia would eat their young.
You really don’t want to respond to my excellent point, do you? There is a notable difference between how poor and rich people vote, so I ask why anyone should expect the results of elections to be substantially different under a new campaign finance system so as to result in policies that are better for the non-rich.
To which you are only willing to reply, “Bu-bu-bu-but the SUPER RICH blah blah blah!” That is an emotional reply to a good question, not a reasoned one.
Post #19 is the only cite I’ve seen in this thread so far that gives rankings. And yeah, it’s similar to the one I used before in another thread we were discussing this same subject in. I never said that the US was overestimated, I did say that I thought China should be ranked higher (i.e. more corrupt), but that’s just me.
I can’t reconstruct the chronology of that conversation, but I do remember that Enron’s chicanery was very well known to me at the time; and (living abroad) the New York Times International Edition was then my main (almost my only) source of such types of information. The person I talked to was intelligent, well educated, and with relatively active progressive politics.
A claim was made that Americans are very well aware of the corruption in their country. In my experience the exact opposite is the case. It is other countries where citizens are aware of corruption and fight to reduce it. In the U.S., it is mainly radicals on the left and on the right who decry corruption and each of those groups tends to misidentify where the real corruption problems are.
Corruption as it applies to govts means you have to pay people in power, into their pockets, to exercise the power of govt on your behalf (rightly or wrongly, have to pay the police to rightly leave you alone when you didn’t anything illegal, or be able to pay the police to wrongly leave you alone when they know you did do something illegal).
I think the distinction between that and campaign finance regulation should be fairly clear in fact, as opposed to worked up rhetoric. But especially if in practice there are fact patterns like:
- a lot of the money in political campaigns doesn’t come from narrow interests. Especially assuming we count unions not as narrow interests based on the relatively large number of their members. But anyway a lot comes from small individual donations.
- standardized international comparisons of corruption count cases, insofar as info is available, where bribes are paid under the guise of political contributions.
- the only somewhat strong relationship between campaign spending and getting elected.
- that very rich individuals often use (mainly) their own money to finance campaigns. This by definition doesn’t include (actually) corrupt quid pro quo’s between themselves and donors.
And it’s much more in the territory of runaway rhetoric to call it ‘corrupt’ that voters are influenced by campaign ads, to the extent they are. Stupid people’s vote counts as much as smart people’s vote, that’s democracy. Having ‘neutral arbiters’ limit campaigning because people will fall for false ads is just less democratic. Not that ‘less democratic’ to any degree from any starting point always equates with ‘bad’, but that part of the equation, ads’ influence on voters, has nothing to do with corruption. The possible nexus with corruption is things promised to donors specifically for money politicians believe will get them elected.
There are gray areas obviously, but the other unsupported assertion is that those gray areas wrt campaign finance happen less often relatively in countries more and less corrupt than the US in standard rankings than the rankings would suggest. IOW arguable but not clearcut quid pro quo corruption in campaign finance might happen less in Finland than the US, but so does real corruption. It might happen more in Mexico, but so does real corruption. Comparing to China, or Thailand, is ridiculous. Those countries are ruled illegitimately by force, absolutely in China’s case and by a pattern of de facto army vetoes over election results in Thailand’s case. Scoring that as an improvement over flawed democracy (even in countries where it’s much more flawed than the US) is upside down, aside from whether flaws in democracy are necessarily ‘corruption’.
I think you’re misunderstanding (and the officers most certainly were).
The “honor” in the Mafia was never what you and I think of as honor - that’s why I put it in scare quotes. Mafia “honor” is exactly the same “honor” that drives a man in rural Pakistan to murder his sister because she has given the family a bad name by having the gall to get raped. It is also exactly the same “honor” that creates the culture of lies and coercion and cover-ups in police forces and the military - therefore the undercover officers quoted were either deliberately misunderstanding the question or were just not very bright. I’m saying that maybe without the threats and terror of that kind of culture, bribes are given and taken with impunity, and with no thought for any consequences beyond the day of receiving the “donation”.
Money equals the press has been true forever. How is that corrupt?
I think there is logical problem here…
Yes, I would agree the US has a problem with political contributions, and the culture of political contributions in the US has crossed a line (i.e. fairly blatant quid pro quo) that in most western countries would be corruption. But it is also true that on the whole the US government and all its various subsidiary arms and bureaucracies is not that corrupt. For all the faults of the US government your average US civil servant might not be paragon of efficiency and civic virtue but they probably aren’t just using their position as a means to corruptly enrich themselves and people they know, via bribes and outright theft (not that it doesn’t happen but it is not the norm).
In many developing countries it is completely the norm that civil servants consider their position a means to corruptly enrich themselves and people they know. In ADDITION to that it is also true that politicians in those countries are just as beholden to fundraisers as US politicians. Except the fundraising is just likely to be for their mansion or luxury car as for their political ads.
So, no, the US is not more corrupt than most developing countries.
Making the OP’s argument about “purity” is completely missing the point. It is, rather, about cumulative effects. The USA’s particular type of normalized corruption has very dangerous large-scale effects, and directly impedes the ability of democratic processes to correct it.
South Africa has a notoriously corrupt government. They may get rid of it, though. When will the USA be rid of the two-party system and pay-to-play politics?
I get that people really want to discuss the issues with the US political system, but the OP didn’t say that third world corrupt politics would be easier to reform, he said US politics is more corrupt. There are plenty of threads where one can discuss the issues of money in US politics without having to jump through hoops to defend a flawed OP.
That’s literally what this thread is about.
In that the corruption is vaster in consequence, more deeply rooted, and even defended by its people. Which seems true of its electoral politics if less so of its police and courts. But the USA’s police are still practicing asset forfeiture without due process, and everybody lets them. When the politics is corrupted, the country follows.
The issue is that in much of the USA, corruption is completely normalized.
I keep asking this question, but it seems to be ignored. What do you think would change, policy-wise, in this country if the campaign finance system were better? Like, what bills do you think would be passed that today cannot, or vice versa?
In relation to “most developing countries”. That’s specifically what the thread is about. The OP has given zero examples of countries he finds better, and you yourself only came up with “South Africa could clean up.”
I just don’t think it is true that US is more corrupt than most other countries. Many countries have politicians that act in their own interest or on behalf of influential groups. But this is scrutinized in countries with an independent media, debated on public forums, occasionally criticized in books or satirized on late night television. Not every country has a mostly independent media, books on the Trumps and Kochs, allows entertainers like Colbert or public criticism.
Single-payer health care for one. Money, especially that which comes from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, is what’s keeping the US in the dark ages healthcarewise.
Gun control is prevented by money from the NRA and gun manufacturers.
Absolute monarchs had court jesters too.
Is the USA more corrupt than Malawi or South Africa? I don’t know. But the USA is very successfully and determinedly corrupt. And its corruption extends to using its state power to serve private businesses’s interest against other states. The USA’s corruption has many, many victims, both within and without its borders.
I disagree. Opposition from the public ran deep for a long time, which is thankfully starting to change, but I don’t believe that campaign contributions from those industries managed to influence the opinion of a majority of Americans until quite recently.
And note, that opinions on single payer healthcare are changing in the last few years, the same period during which independent expenditures are exploding. If campaign spending by those industries made a difference in public opinion, when it looks like spending by that industry increased by ~40% from 2008 to 2016.
I missed a few words there, and needed more clarity.
“If campaign spending by those industries made a difference in public opinion, it should be in the opposite direction to the recent trend, because it looks like spending by the healthcare industry increased by ~40% from 2008 to 2016.”
American public opinion is irrelevant. Paying Congresscritters for their ears and votes is relevant. The US is an oligarchy, not a democracy.
It is relevant, because if you’re asserting that our broken campaign finance system prevents good policies from being enacted, I think you need to find examples of proposals that have public support but elite opposition. Single payer health care had poor support among the public until recently, as well as poor support among elites.
Interestingly, even as healthcare industry campaign spending goes up, more Dems are starting to support a single payer system - a proposal that wasn’t on the table eight years ago.